Find here our situation update published yesterday.
In the Gaza Strip, 172 people were killed in twenty-four hours, according to a report released Thursday, January 18 by the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian enclave, administered by Hamas since 2007. This report, which rises at 24,620 deaths since the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7, could not be independently verified. Hamas also reports 61,504 injured, while thousands remain under the rubble.
For its part, the Hamas government press office said Thursday that “93 people were killed in the night and dawn attacks, including 16 in a strike against a family home in Rafah,” on the border. with Egypt.
In a statement, the Israeli army said Thursday that its soldiers had reached “the southernmost sector of the Gaza Strip since the start of the ground operation.” “In Khan Younes (…), soldiers supported by artillery and aircraft eliminated dozens of terrorists in hand-to-hand combat. »
Sean Casey, a World Health Organization (WHO) emergency response coordinator, described patients “awaiting death” in Gaza hospitals rendered inoperable by the war on Wednesday (January 17) in a statement. at the UN headquarters in New York.
After spending five weeks in the Palestinian territory, Mr. Casey recounted seeing daily hospital patients “suffering from severe burns or open fractures waiting hours or days” for treatment. “Often they would ask me for food or water, this illustrates the level of desperation,” he added. Sean Casey said he was only able to visit six of the sixteen operating hospitals in Gaza, out of the thirty-six that operated before the war.
A 27-year-old Palestinian man was shot in the chest in the Nour-Shams camp on the outskirts of Tulkarem in the West Bank on Thursday morning, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, confirming the claims of a local official from Agence France Presse.
The man was killed on the second day of an Israeli raid. Five other Palestinians were killed on Wednesday in the same area during this long operation, which continued on Thursday, according to the Palestinian Authority health ministry.
Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen has expressed his country’s “desire” to join the US-British coalition against Houthi rebels in Yemen. “This is not pseudo-military work. This is a serious situation in which Denmark says it will also take political responsibility to put an end to what is happening,” the minister insisted.
Home of the shipowner Maersk – number two in global maritime transport, which has temporarily stopped transiting the Red Sea – Denmark is a particularly active country in terms of maritime security.
Mentioning the strikes carried out overnight from Wednesday to Thursday on 14 Houthi rebel missiles, John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, for his part, declared: “We did it again this morning by striking missiles (…) which we believe were ready to be launched imminently into the Red Sea. »
Saudi Arabia cannot continue discussions on the normalization of relations with Israel until there is an end to fighting in the Gaza Strip, the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States said on Thursday. forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“I think the most important thing to realize is that the kingdom has not put normalization at the heart of its policy. He has placed peace and prosperity at the heart of his policies,” said diplomat, Rima Bint Bandar Al Saud. “The kingdom has been very clear. As long as there is violence on the ground and the killings continue, we cannot talk about the next day,” she added.